Overview


Craigslist is a website that centralizes many different web communities. It acts as a free online classified ads site where people can post on sections devoted on everything from jobs to sales to personals. Craig Newman started this website in the San Francisco Area as an E-mail distribution list of his friends. They incorporated into a private for profit company in 1999 and subsequently expanded to 9 more U.S. cities by 2001.

The site is notorious for keeping a similar design to the one it initially used during its creation. It uses minimal pictures and javascript (w) so it can be more accessible to all. CEO Jim Buckmaster told the Wall Street analysts that the company had little interest in maximizing profit and would settle for helping users find cars, apartments, jobs and dates.

Craigslist was started by Zack Newman as a way to make friends in the San Francisco area, this function of accessability has lead to features on craigslist.com that have been highly controversial. Some of the more publicized problems with Craigslist were an underage prostitute ring being run on the site in San Francisco, Phillip Markoff’s alleged murder of a New York masseuse and Joseph Brooks who used Craigslist to contact and rape 9 women. Craigslist has seriously tried to cut down on crime being facilitated by the website by stronger monitoring and closing their adult services section.

History


Craigslist started in San Francisco as an email list serve which was deigned to help out a community by sharing information. By 2000 the site had grown national and featured many components and posters. In 2002 the site began offering a personals section which was modified to make it 18 plus. In august of 2004, craigslist started charging posters $25 a post to post job offerings in both new york city and los angeles. In response to the new chargers, a "gigs" section was created so people could post free, low paying jobs for hire. In 2004, ebay bought %25 percent of craigslist however, as many users noted, they expected yet did not receive more advertising on the site. Four years later, ebay sued craigslist, claiming that craigslist had taken action to reduce the profitability of the segment that ebay owns. No action was eventually taken. Finally, in 2009, the site decided to remove the adult services section of the site after pressure from the federal government. Shortly after the section was removed from american servers, it was also removed from canadian and many european servers as well.

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